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05 September 2018

BOOK: Jonathan GIENAPP, The Second Creation : Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). ISBN 9780674185043, €31.50

Harvard
University Press is publishing a book on the early history of the American
constitution later this month.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A stunning
revision of our founding document’s evolving history that forces us to confront
anew the question that animated the founders so long ago: What is our
Constitution?

Americans widely
believe that the United States Constitution was created when it was drafted in
1787 and ratified in 1788. But in a shrewd rereading of the founding era,
Jonathan Gienapp upends this long-held assumption, recovering the unknown story
of American constitutional creation in the decade after its adoption—a story
with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism
and interpretation.

When the
Constitution first appeared, it was shrouded in uncertainty. Not only was its
meaning unclear, but so too was its essential nature. Was the American
Constitution a written text, or something else? Was it a legal text? Was it
finished or unfinished? What rules would guide its interpretation? Who would
adjudicate competing readings? As political leaders put the Constitution to
work, none of these questions had answers. Through vigorous debates they
confronted the document’s uncertainty, and—over time—how these leaders imagined
the Constitution radically changed. They had begun trying to fix, or resolve,
an imperfect document, but they ended up fixing, or cementing, a very
particular notion of the Constitution as a distinctively textual and historical
artifact circumscribed in space and time. This means that some of the
Constitution’s most definitive characteristics, ones which are often treated as
innate, were only added later and were thus contingent and optional.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Gienapp
is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. A scholar of early
American political culture, he has written several articles on early
constitutional history and modern constitutional theory and interpretation that
speak to current political concerns.